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Gillian Barnard received a BA in Art History from Duke University and an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute in London. Her MA dissertation focused on the importance of truth and accuracy in the works of Sophie Calle and Christian Boltanski. Her PhD thesis will focus on the correlation between memory and the still image in contemporary art and film. Gillian currently works for an art marketing and PR company in London.
Susanne Bauer is an architect who recieved her Diploma from the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany and her MA in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association. She has been working in practices in Germany and the USA and since 2004 has worked for Foster and Partners in London. She joined the PhD programme to continue her theoretical work focused on 20th century Art and Architecture. Her main interests are the consistency and the contradiction in movements such as Modernism and Postmodernism and she hopes to explore them by means of colour and its counterpart whiteness.
Petri Berndtson received his BA and MA from the University of Helsinki in the Department of Philosophy. His Master’s thesis was an examination of breathing from the perspective of transcendental philosophy. In his PhD thesis, Petri will continue his transcendental project of breathing. His main interests are Phenomenological Philosophy, Eastern philosophy, different Methods of Breathing, Philosophy of Religion (mysticism) and stand-up comedy as a way of philosophizing. Petri has taught philosophy for many years in the Lahti University of Applied Sciences.
Shaun Bertram holds degrees in psychology (BA) and sociology (BA Honours, MA) from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she also worked part-time as a lecturer and teaching assistant. Her doctoral dissertation research — an analysis of motivational art in the contemporary Anglo-American workspace — builds upon her previous research in the areas of contemporary managerial ideology, 20th century Western warfare, and visual culture and embodiment.
Belinda Bowring previously studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, completing a BA in History of Art and MA in Postmodernism in the American Context. Formerly the Managing Editor of frieze magazine, her writing has appeared in numerous publications including frieze, The Times and i-D. Her PhD research is on the politics of appropriation; focusing on artwork that acts as an interruptive device, co-opting the tactics of an existing societal system.
Tereza Bruzzi de Carvalho is a architect and practises in set and costumes design, building heritage and museography. She undertook her undergraduate studies in Brazil (1996) and in 1999 attend on Aprenticeship progamme at Mountview Academy of Arts in set design. Between 2004 and 2007, Tereza worked as a chief at Casa do Baile - Urbanism, Architecture and Design Centre of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her research interests are in curating, museography and modernist architecture.
Ingrid Chen majored in English Literature in National Central University, Taiwan before coming to London (BA). As a constant traveler among cultures, she finished her MA in Comparative Literature in University College London writing about politicized nostalgia in both European and Asian literature, focusing on the special case of her place of birth- Taiwan. Falling in love with London, Ingrid then became interested in history of art and museum studies, and completed a certificate in history of art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her never-ending passion of shopping blended with her fascination with museum shops and formed her recent interest in the branding of art institutions and the institutionalization of department stores as commissioners and patrons of art in London. Observing shop window design has become her new “window” to discover a city. The issues of public art, urban landscape and accessibility of art reside in shop windows will be her future focus and also her PhD thesis. Ingrid will be traveling again between Europe and the Far East comparing the culture of shop window designs and keep digging into the relationship between consumerism and art in history.
Eu Jin Chua is from Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds degrees in English literature, architectural studies, and film and media studies, and spent one semester in engineering school (a long time ago). His article on the American multimedia artist Laurie Anderson appeared in Postmodern Culture in 2006, and a review essay was published in the Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature this year. He recently served as a research assistant on the film Derek (a biographical documentary of Derek Jarman, directed by Isaac Julien), which will be screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this summer, after showing at the Sundance Film Festival and the Serpentine Gallery. He spent the summer of 2007 at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University where he became a diehard Spinozist (and possibly a Jamesleuzian?). He is currently interested in art, film, ecological thought, aesthetic theory, materialist thought, science studies, and the history of philosophy, and is writing his thesis on cinematic affect and ecological thought. He is a 2005-2008 Commonwealth Scholar and will be a Wingate Scholar in the 2008-2009 academic year.
Barbara Chomicka is a qualified project manager and chartered architect with 8 years’ experience. She is currently managing the design stage of one of the largest regeneration schemes in the North West – BBC Media City in Manchester. Barbara’s research aims to assist solutions to the topics spotlit in ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’ (1999), and ‘Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance - The Urban Renaissance six years on’ (2005), the ground-breaking official and independent reports of the Urban Task Force chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside. Changing the way we see what housing actually is seems to be the key – rather than the process of delivering new residential development. Barbara aims to assist shifting this viewpoint, by evidence and argument, and encourage new thought. How can we change people’s views? How can demand for high-density compact homes be aroused? Barbara’s research is based on theoretical study, and her personal experience in the UK, United States and Poland.
Yu Ling Chou was a research assistant in the Graduate School of Arts & Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts. She received her MA degree in Taiwan, worked on the ‘Taiwan Media Art Archives’ project, and her research interests mainly focus on photography and media art theory.
Patsy Craig is half Peruvian and half Scottish. She has a background in fine art and design having received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Patsy has been living in London for the past 12 years and although painting is the constant thread, she has elaborated upon this primal urge to incorporate a wide range of image and text based pursuits. She has worked as a textile designer and has a fascination with ancient Peruvian textiles. She was also the creative director of a design studio, which has been uniquely instrumental in realising work for contemporary artists. In 2003 she edited and co-designed a book about this studio called Making Art Work (Trolley) and in 2004 co-curated an exhibition at the Architectural Association about the studio called MAKING ART WORK. Her current endeavours are known as T WO and include collaborations in the editorial, curatorial, and artistic realms.
Benjamin Cranfield (MRes 2003) has been working in the contemporary arts sector since graduating from Cambridge with a BA in History in 2001. For two years he was a director of Houldsworth Gallery, London working with contemporary artists to promote, sell and curate their work. In 2002/3 he completed an MRes at the London Consortium focusing on London visual print culture of the late Eighteenth century. Currently he is completing the ICA/Consortium Studentship/PhD awarded by the AHRC, producing the first history of the ICA from inception in 1947 to the present, with the aim of creating a cultural and art-historical analysis of post-war Britain at the, much neglected, institutional level. He will also be holding talks and curating events around the ICA’s history both in and around the institute. Ben continues to work within the arts sector as a cultural consultant offering research, writing and management skills to academics, galleries and artists.
Hannah Crosson has a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from Norwich School of Art and Design. Since graduating in 2001 she has completed a BTEC Professional Development Certificate in Professional Arts Practice and Management. She has worked in curatorial roles with the artist run spaces; ROOM artspace and the Cube Microplex in Bristol. Hannah moved to London in 2004 to take up a position as Administrator for the Live Art Development Agency where she developed and managed the Agency’s performance documentation archive. Hannah joined New Work Network as administrator in 2006, a network for artists working in Live Art, contemporary performance and interdisciplinary practice. Hannah’s research interests question the interplay between fiction and reality, and the transformation and performance of identities.
gabriella daris (Tsavdaris) was born in Toronto and grew up partly in Greece, mostly weaving among cultures of the globe. She has been dancing since the age of 2, on ground, rock, water, air, and is now seeking her own Greco-Japanese Butoh. She has taught and performed Butoh internationally, and is a professional rock climber and scuba diver instructor. She achieved her BA in History of Art from Goldsmiths College, has been assisting in the curating of exhibitions by the German filmmaker and pre-cinema collector Werner Nekes, and is brainstorming his script for a new film project on the analysis of motion and dance-notation. Gabriella’s research interests are the relationships between the body behaviour in human and animal, the kinesics and proxemics of the body, silent language, performance of memory, surrealism of the body, transformation, transcendentalism, the dance of death, hysteria, trauma studies, death and sexuality, narcissism, sadism, ethics of eroticism, existentialism, and phenomenology of vision.
Freda Davies has recently completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She has various other degrees and
fluctuates between philosophy, art, writing and quantum physics. Hopefully she will be able to encompass all her interests in her PhD.
Ben Dawson has a BA in English Literature from Durham and an MA in Modern Literature from Birkbeck where, under the supervision of Steven Connor, he wrote a dissertation on relations of Law and Life in Ulysses. Drawing on recent theorisations of the biopolitical, and responding to a new vitalism in much contemporary philosophy, his PhD investigates the allegation that, in modernity, ‘life’ is immediately politics, and focuses on connections in the late eighteenth century between the evolving discourse of rights, physical and metaphysical conceptions of the ‘vivifying principle’, and the ‘birth of biopolitics’. In a separate project, Ben is editing for publication a doctor’s wartime account of life as a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma railway.
Cormac Deane’s PhD research is in the proliferation of images of terrorists and counter-terrorists in fiction and Hollywood films of the last two decades. The research explores the reasons why we encounter terrorists so often, the consequences of their proliferation and the nature of their representation. Primary supervisor is Costas Douzinas, secondary supervisor is Joanna Bourke, both of Birkbeck. Cormac was born Dublin in 1972. He has an MA in Film Studies from University College Dublin and a BA in English and Russian from Trinity College Dublin. He worked as a TV news journalist in Berlin for five years.
Sarah Dorrington has just completed her fourth year of Medicine at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and has spent three years working with destitute asylum-seekers in the North East. She has worked in Ghana and Togo and is currently part of an HDV film project with a London based artist and Curanderas in Mexico.
Nathan Dunne studied art history at Cambridge University. He is the author and editor of a major survey on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Tarkovsky (2008), and the organizer of the international symposium, The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky, at Tate Modern (2008). He recently spoke at Harvard University on the work of Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov and is currently working on a project about the British artist John Latham.
Sian Evans grew up in Sydney, Australia and studied at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, graduating with an MA Art Administration (2000) and a BA Art Theory (1999). Her PhD focuses on the artist as restaurateur: food as a catalyst for invitational art through the 1990s and in contemporary practice. She is interested in the restorative nature of artworks that use food, whether it be to restore social relations, cultural exchange or to re-establish identity and whether this parallels or goes against current trends in society. She has also been awarded a Vivid Interdisciplinary Support Programme Bursary through which she is currently coordinating a food and art seminar and event series in Birmingham, to take place in February 2007.
Nicky Falkof holds a BA in English and Drama and a postgraduate Honours in English from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where her fourth year creative writing dissertation was supervised by JM Coetzee. She moved to the UK in 2000 and began working in the media as a writer, editor and sub-editor. Her non-fiction book Ball and Chain: the Trouble with Modern Marriage will be published by Vision in the UK in early November 2007. In 2005 she completed an MA in Critical Theory at the University of Sussex, with a dissertation on masculinity and ideology in 1980s action cinema. Nicky holds research studentships from Birkbeck University and the Consortium. Her PhD thesis will focus on race, power, manhood, masculinity, fetishism and the body in pre- and post-Apartheid South African cinema. She is also involved in a Brighton-based performance collective and sings (in Yiddish) with a klezmer-reggae fusion band.
Christiane Fashek (MRes 2004) is an architect. She has studied urbanism, Beaux Arts and contemporary architecture at the University of Notre Dame, the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab and the London Consortium. She teaches in the Diploma School at the AA. Christiane has worked on the City of Culture at Eisenman Architects in New York and frequently writes about architectural and cultural theory. Her London Consortium masters dissertation focused on urban initiatives in catastrophic aftermath; her PhD is a theoretical and philosophical interpretation of the urban architectural event.
Rebecca Faulkner is a curator with a museum studies/art history background. She received her MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (1999) and holds a BA in English from Leeds University (1996). Her Ph.D. focuses on the adaptive reuse of religious buildings as museums and cultural centres, questioning what happens when art, literally as well as metaphorically, moves into the space once occupied by religion.
Alice Gavin received her BA in Modern History and English from the University of Oxford in 2005. An MA in European Culture at University College London allowed her to continue and expand her interdisciplinary interests. Her research at the London Consortium will engage with issues of opacity and transparency in both architecture and literature in the Modernist period, drawing also on the idea of the ‘gaze’ in its theoretical aspect. Academic pursuits aside, Alice spends a significant chunk of her spare time carting a piano round London, playing this: http://www.myspace.com/alicehonor.
Miranda Gavin is a journalist, photographer and corporate reporter. She is a regular contributor for various photography magazines in the UK and abroad, including Hotshoe, British Journal of Photography and Katalog. She graduated from the University of Westminster with a BA (Hons) in Photography, Film and Video and has in the past worked as a teacher, photography trainer and in PR. She has travelled extensively for many years and has lived and worked abroad. Her MRes involves a multi-disciplinary analysis of mannequins, particularly their appropriation by photographers, as well as an exploration of the nature of the spectator’s gaze in public spaces.
Christien Garcia received a BA in Sociology and Art History from the University of Alberta in Canada (2007). His interests revolve around the sociological production of gender and sexuality and in particular, the role narratives of melancholia play as both a productive topos through which artists assert notions of subjectivity and one that affirms solitude and mortality as a destructive consequence of desire. He is also curious about the production of reduced scale architecture such as floor plans, box dioramas and handheld installations for use within academic investigations.
Linda Gieres is a dance choreographer, performer, teacher and writer. Originally from Luxembourg, she graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA in dance in 2004. She also holds a BA in dance with a concentration in dance history and criticism from Marymount Manhattan College in New York as well as the Diplôme d’Etat de Professeur de Danse, which she obtained in Paris. Her current research interests concern the female body in dance in the context of 20th century Western society.
Alistair Gill BA (Hons), AADipl, MRes is an Architect. He graduated from the Architectural Association before his Masters at the London Consortium on ‘Henri Bergson: A New Organicism’. He is currently writing his PhD on ‘Time, Relationship and the Social: Badiou, Mathematics and the Non-Public’. He has served as Visiting Professor to the Graduate Schools of the University of Texas UTA and the Technical University of Ljubljana. For the last three years (ongoing) he has taught a design unit at the Architectural Association, and continues to teach both in the U.S. and Europe. He is Co-Founder of the Architectural and Media Company ‘Impossible Productions Ink’.
Jonathan Gross received his BA in Social and Political Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2005. As an undergraduate his interests centred on the history of political thought. He spent a year in London working for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and for ‘Shape’, a charity seeking to improve access to the arts for people with disabilities. In 2006-7 he studied at the Centre for European Studies, University College London, gaining an MA in European Culture. His MA dissertation examined the treatment of heroism in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and in Prokofiev’s operatic adaptation of the novel.
Cécile Guédon has just completed her MA in European Culture at the Centre for European Studies, University College London, on a Marie Curie Fellowship. She took a DEA at La Sorbonne, Paris in Comparative Literature in 2005 and has studied in Pisa as an exchange student in 2003-2004, in Berlin and in Heidelberg in 2005-2006. Mainly interested in European Modern poetry Cécile has explored the stylistic appropriation of danced gestures and the choreographical ars poetica in European modern poetry (Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, William Butler Yeats, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke and Filippo T. Marinetti). Her M.A. dissertation focused on the concept of abstract dance and the analysis of Bauhaus “Triadic Ballet†by Oskar Schlemmer (1922). She would like to further investigate the figural role of dance and performed movement in modernist aesthetics for her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium. Find out mroe at http://cecileguedon.cgpublisher.com/
Seong-ju Ham holds a BA in Oriental Philosophy from Sungkyunkwn University in South Korea. In 1998, she gained an MA in History of Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She also studied in the Fine Art department of the University of Leeds for one year.
Rikke Hansen holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College (University of London) and in 2003 she completed an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory at Middlesex University. Since then she has been a lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths and has written and lectured widely on contemporary art and theory in both Britain and abroad. Her research is often interdisciplinary and collaborative and tends to wander into the field of geography. She is particularly interested in the representation of nature and animal performances in contemporary society. The working title of her PhD is: ‘The Sublime “After Nature”: Meanings of Nature in Art, with Particular Reference to Contemporary Art Practices’. Her PhD research is part of a larger three-year AHRC-funded project at Tate Britain on ‘The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language’. Rikke is a regular contributor to Art Monthly.
Samantha Jayne Hulston (MRes 2006) studied English Language and Literature at King’s College, London before fleeing the country to work as an English language teacher in Quebec for one year. Upon her return, she worked as the Press Officer for Battersea Arts Centre. In October 2005, Samantha joined the London Consortium’s MRes programme, completing the course by submitting a dissertation on the experiential in digital and networked art. During her Masters studies, Samantha co-curated an exhibition of photography for a central London squat, worked with the artist collective Take2030 on a digital art project, co-ordinated a graduate conference entitled ‘Happiness: Lessons from the Arts’ with PhD students at Queen Mary and worked with a London-based art-activist group to realise a conference in Leipzig on surveillance culture. Currently, Samantha is working with this same group to present an exhibition in Sunderland in July 2007. Samantha’s PhD research is concerned with investigating the rhythms of movement in architectonic installation art and the perception of these rhythms.
Katherine Hunt has a degree in History and English, and has spent the last four years working as an assistant curator in museums (most of the time at the V&A). Her main research interest is medieval and renaissance European sculpture. She wants to write about the way in which sculptural objects, particularly those with religious significance, relate to urban space in the past and in the present. She is from London, which she has recently decided is her favourite city.
Ermana Kaplama holds a BA in Political Science from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey). He has an MSc degree in Political Theory from the LSE and works as a Private Tutor of Philosophy, Politics and Turkish for Alpha Tutors. His PhD research covers Nietzsche, the Dionysian, Pre-Platonic Aesthetics, Greek Tragedy and 18th and 19th century German Aesthetics. It will focus on the generation, development and revival of the Aesthetics of Human Nature from Homeric Gods to 19th century German Tradition with reference to Nietzschean Aesthetics.
Evgeniy Kazannik holds degrees in Law from Kaliningrad State University, Russia. Coming to London in 2001, he became interested in visual arts and completed a certificate in professional photography practice at London College of communications pursuing his old passion and love for photography. He is currently curating a short film festival ‘Future Shorts’, has organised a series of exhibitions in the Baltics, is involved in the organisation of the Russian Film Festival in London, started the music night ‘Eugenesis’, and recently initiated a project called ‘Secret Cinema’. Evgeniy’s research interests focus on the convergence of visual arts and music.
Jane Kingsley (MRes 2006) holds degrees in Biology and Psychology (Combined), and Photography, as well as an MRes from the London Consortium. She is interested in the role visual representation has played in natural history and the mutual influences of arts and sciences on historical and contemporary conceptions of animals. Her PhD research explores the cultural history of taxidermy from the stuffed birds of early collectors, through Victorian anthropomorphic tableaux and hoax mermaids to the recent resurgence of interest among contemporary artists and art schools.
Ozlem Koksal received her BA from Bilkent University in Turkey in the department of Communication and Design. She then came to London and did her MA in Goldsmiths College with a dissertation on recent Turkish Films. She is interested in the questions of how traumatic experiences are reflected in films, and the relation between film and collective memory.
Noam Leshem is a graduate of the Department for Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Leshem is a Wingate Scholar and his current research investigates the ability of land and cityscapes to retain histories that have otherwise been suppressed or excluded, focusing on the context of Israel and Palestine. Through an ‘archeology of the surface’, Leshem presents a new spatial history that challenges the conventions of historiography, political division and the experiential significance of space. Leshem has previously worked with Amnesty International, the Israeli Palestinian Center for Research and various other NGOs. Parts of Leshem’s work on memory activism in Israel will be published this year in The Politics of Cultural Memory anthology (Cambridge Scholarly Press).
Pei Yi Lu is a curator from Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MA degree in Museology and BA degree in Chinese Literature in Taiwan. She has worked in several different art institutions including as curator at Fubon Art Foundations, as an independent curator and as a project manager in private galleries. Her curating experiences include: curator, “Random-ize Taipei—International video art exhibition†, Taipei East, 13 sites; co-curator, “Very Fun Park—Contemporary Art in East Taipeiâ€, East Taipei, 30 sites, 2001. In 2003, Pei Yi took part in a curator residency program in Sydney provided by the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs and Australian China Council. Pei Yi also regularly contributes articles to art magazines such as ARTCO and Artist.
Helen Mallinson is a principal lecturer in history and theory at the school of architecture and spatial design, London Metropolitan University. She is researching the topic of air in seventeenth century history of science and philosophy.
Thomas Mansell studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, and Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. He is researching Samuel Beckett’s ambivalent relationship with music, particularly as experienced through the piano. He has spoken at several conferences, the most recent being ‘Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust’ (Cardiff, March 2006), and has published in journals such as Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, the Beckett Circle, Performance Research, and the Yearbook of English Studies. He is a contributor to the forthcoming Rodopi volume Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, edited by Mark Byron, and is assisting with the organisation of Beckett and Company (Tate Modern and Goldsmiths, London, 6—8 October 2006), part of the Beckett centenary celebrations.
Wissam Mansour is an architect; he has practiced and taught architecture in Beirut and in London. His research at the London Consortium investigates contemporary design techniques -scenario, simulation and kinematics- and the effect of these techniques on the communication between the creative imaginary in digital design processes and their corresponding emergent aesthetic.
Susan Mapstone completed her part-time MA in Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2003, whilst working as sub-editor for a computing magazine. During her Masters dissertation, under the supervision of Prof Steve Connor, she developed her interest in post-modern literature and concepts of entropy, which have now become the basis for her PhD. Her research focuses on theories of positive and negative entropy found in thermodynamics and information theory, as well as the applications these concepts may have in literature. Current research includes an investigation of entropy’s role in the development of cognitive psychology. Susan is also a lecturer in English and Psychology.
Irini Marinaki studied photography and video art at Focus (Institute of Photography and Video Art) in Athens, Greece. She holds a BA (Hons) in Art History and Critical Studies from Camberwell College of Arts, and a MA in Art History from Goldsmiths College. She has worked as a free-lance photographer, art critic and archivist for various institutions including: the photography department of ELIA (Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive), Athens; IMTIIE (Institute for the Study of Regional History and History of Enterprises), Piraeus, Greece; the audiovisual collection of ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), London et.al. Her PhD thesis explores the work of Greek art theorists, curators and art editors such as: Nicolas Calas, Alexander Iolas and Stratis Eleftheriades (Teriade).
Irini is a member of the editorial board of the London Consortium’s web resource Static and she is currently co-organising a London Consortium event on breathing.
Richard Martin joined the London Consortium after two years as an advisor at the government’s architecture and urban design agency, CABE. He previously worked in political research and communications. Richard has a BA in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester (which included a semester on exchange at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and an MA in English from University College London, where his research focused on the work of Philip Guston and Philip Roth. His PhD will examine the role of architecture in the work of David Lynch, analysing the structure and significance of Lynch’s built environments alongside those of other writers, artists and film-makers such as Kafka, Godard, Hitchcock, Bacon and Hopper.
Ross McElwain read English Literature at Cambridge University, graduating in 2005. He then spent a year in Berlin studying peripatetically, writing, making DV shorts and discovering German theatre traditions and the films of John Cassavetes. His interests are mainly in Beckett (on whom his Master’s research will focus), Chris Marker, Nabokov, Kafka and ‘pataphysics.
Jonathan McKay was awarded his degree in Graphic Design from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He went on to co-found his own successful design agency in 2004, specialising in motion graphics and branding for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and other South African channels. This experience resulted in an acute interest in the ways in which national broadcasters attempt to manufacture national and cultural identity. The turbulent recent history of his home country has also instilled in Jonathan a fascination with the aesthetics, ethics and psychology of security. It may also be responsible for his obsession with teen slasher movies.
Emer O’Brien is an artist and photographer. Her highly distinctive images combine the flattery of a portrait with the honesty of a news snap, the mess and grandeur of a landscape with the formalism of a blue print. Since 2003 she has been observing man’s impact on the environment. Emer’s research will take the practice of ’swailing’ - a land management technique of controlled burning - as its subject, using this to explore notions of metamorphosis of the environment and space management.
Senam Okudzeto is an artist and writer. She received her BA in Fine Art from the Slade (1995), MFA from the Royal College of Art (1997) and continued post graduate study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study program (1999-2000), and Harvard University, where she was a Radcliffe Institute Research Fellow (2003-2004). She has taught in universities in Switzerland and the USA, and is a member of the editorial board of the CAA publication Art Journal. Seman’s research topic for the London Consortium will investigate commodity fetishism, modernity, memory and material culture in the context of post-independence West Africa.
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Roger Orwell was born near Southampton and grew up in the west of England. He has lived and worked in Sweden and central Spain and now lives in east London. He has wide-ranging interests in language theory, poetics, literature and fine art, and is currently exploring notional and functional accounts of context and relevance. He has a first class honours degree in Linguistics and English Critical Theory from the University of Westminster, London, plus qualifications in teaching from Trinity College London and English Phonetics from The IPA at University College London. Creativity has always been there as a counterpoint to the theory, first in music, then words, and now mostly daydreams. While killing time in the 1990s he worked in the UK music industry. He presently teaches English language at The University of the Arts London.
Richard Osborne has a BA in English Literature and History from the College of St Paul and St Mary and an MA in Popular Culture from the Open University. His doctoral research is on vinyl and shellac records.
Jean Owen (MRes 2006) is writing a PhD thesis which negotiates the daughter-father model of incest through the Cyprian myth of Myrrha and Cinyras found in Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and through the autobiographical writings of Anaïs Nin and Kathryn Harrison. Broadly speaking, Jean’s research areas include feminist theory, psychoanalysis, literature criticism and fairy tale. In recent years Jean’s artistic work has investigated father-daughter relationships through poetry and film.
Imogen Parker has recently finished a BA in Music at Oxford University. Having had intensive exposure to practical music, performing and studying piano and clarinet at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, organ at the International Organ Conservatoire and working as musical director of the Mary Somerville Choir, three years of ‘academic’ music left her with a distrust, or rather, curiosity about the division of music as praxis, as aesthetic object and as (often somewhat sterile) academic discipline. Her final year allowed her to develop these ideas, bringing postmodernism into dialogue with music, and she looks forward to expanding these ideas with reference to the other arts.
Elinor Pearson completed her BA in History of Art at Goldsmiths College, before spending two years working in events management. In 2004 she returned to Goldsmiths for the MA Contemporary Art Theory. Elinor is a participant in ‘Technologies of Lived Abstraction’, an ongoing research project sponsored by The Sense Lab and the Workshop in Radical Empiricism, based in Montreal, CA. Her research interests include theorisations of the body in movement with particular focus on dance, gesture and endurance.
Sandra Plummer is an artist and writer from Ireland who studied Fine Art at Middlesex University. Her PhD research addresses the ontology of the photograph in contemporary art. She is interested in art that engages with the materiality or process of photography itself. The work of Gilles Deleuze informs her research on the theory and philosophy of photography. She has contributed to the Consortium journal Static and has written on the artist Vik Muniz in Textile:The Journal of Cloth and Culture. She is a member of the Consortium/Middlesex University research group organising a conference at Tate Britain on the sublime in October 2007.
Shahina Rahman spent time working as a research assistant at the Institute of Psychiatry before deciding to return to academia. Previous to that she completed a BSc in Psychology (2003) and a MA in European Culture (2004); both at UCL. Her research interests include looking at the function of religion in the genre of fantasy, more specifically, the ‘marvellous’. Broadly speaking she hopes to identify how and why fantasy novels with religious themes and symbolism are so popular in this secular society today. She also has a (un)healthy interest in psychoanalysis and hopes to work that into her examination of fantasy. Her work at the Institute led her to co-author a paper to be published in the Medical Journal in March 2007, and she will also eventually co-author a book with her supervisor on the History of Maudsley Hospital (due 2007).
Jon Revell is a freelance production designer and producer making work both for his own production company and for others. His research centers around space, journey and narrative taking detours to explore the darker side of life, in all its glory. Jon has rather large curly blond hair which occasionally turns to ginger, a small cat called Evil Chutney; Lady of the Massacre and the tendency to listen to Radio 4 rather too much to be healthy. The rest is subject to change without notice.
Seph Rodney is interested in what it takes to hold contradictory opinions in the mind at the same time without granting one prominence over the other. He is convinced this conceptual gymnastic ability is necessary to the process of experiencing contemporary art (and perhaps modern art as well). Having come from a past of art making, performance and writing in the U.S., he is now more interested in the mechanisms by which meaning is corralled, registered, and made. How very large museums compress and illuminate the, at times playful, at other times intense, struggles with meaning into their rooms—those strictly controlled caverns for dreaming is his current research project. This study entails comparing two rooms: one in the Tate Modern and another within the Museum of Modern Art in New York in terms of how they employ structures for making meaning. He also doesn’t mind just being beguiled by beauty now and again.
Martine Rouleau completed a Masters in Communication at the Université du Québec à Montréal focusing on the reception of documentary photography. Her Ph.D. research, has evolved towards an interest in the roles and responsibilities of the museum. Taking a specific interest in marginal reactions and approaches to art that happen within the museum, Martine wishes to question the idea of aesthetics that pervades the institution and to investigate alternatives. Martine is a tutor at Westminster Adult Education Service, contributes to critical arts magazines as a freelance writer and book reviewer and is founding co-editor of the Static website, a web resource for an interdisciplinary study of the contemporary culture. Martine holds the Tate-Consortium studentship, as part of which she is organizing the ongoing series of talks The Philosophy of the Overlooked at the ICA.
Ikuko Sakakibara was born in Nagoya, Japan, and studied architecture at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. After doing a workshop in France sponsored by the Vitra Design Museum and the Centre Pompidou, she decided to stay on in Europe and studied for a Masters degree at the Dessau Institute of Architecture in Germany. Ikuko went on to work at Zaha Hadid Architects in London. She is interested in making comparisons between Eastern and Western cultures of consumption and reflecting upon the myth of minimalism in contemporary architecture.
Vasileios Sakkos has a BA in English Literature from the National University of Athens and an MA in Literature from the University Of Essex. His PhD research focuses on skin deformity and the way it is depicted through comic books, films and animation. He is immersed in escapist fiction and is constantly drowning in television waves and radio frequencies. He has a damaged eardrum (his left one) due to a Sunn0))) concert. He is a columnist in a comic book website (www.comicdom.gr) and even though he is no Carrie Bradshaw, he did present an award ceremony in a recent convention. His hero is Goatboy. He aims to please too.
Stephen Sale (MRes 2003) is exploring the relationship between technology and culture through a critical appraisal of the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Kittler’s empirical investigations into the relationship between media technologies and discourse force us to reconsider the role of technology in literary and historical analysis and can serve to inform complementary tendencies in literary studies and the history of science. Stephen’s continuing work as a technology analyst also informs his PhD research. Stephen has an MRes from the London Consortium and a first degree in political theory.
Aviva Schultz completed her BA degree in Playwrighting and Theatrical Performance at Mills College in 1994. During her undergraduate career she wrote, directed and produced several one act plays. She has also completed a certificate program in stage performance at RADA. In 1999, Aviva recieved an MA/MFA degree in Writing and Consciousness from New College of California. At the same time she finished work on a collection of experimental prose pieces which is currently being considered for publication. Aviva continues to write and perform her work at various venues. Aviva has taught English and creative writing internationally, most recently, spending a year teaching secondary and university level English in The Czech Republic. Aviva’s research will focus primarily on the role of otherness in contemporary society. She hopes to focus her research particularly on the discourse of difference and the intrinsic function of the outsider in current artistic trends.
Lee Scrivner received a BA (1997) and an MA (1998) in English Literature from the University of Utah, and taught literature and composition at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2001 to 2005) and the College of Southern Nevada (1999 to 2001). His PhD research at the London Consortium, ‘The Age of Insomnia: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (1865 to 1915)’, traces insomnia as a subject of increasing medical and cultural interest and explores how its phenomenologies informed literary modernism. Recently (February, 2008) he appeared on the ‘History of Insomnia’ panel for the Wellcome Centre’s Sleeping and Dreaming exhibition. Also, as the writer of ‘How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto,’ he appeared as a panelist in the ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: The Art of Manifestos’ debate at the British Library’s Breaking the Rules exhibition (February, 2008). His poetry has appeared in The Wolf and Poet Lore, and has been set to music and performed at Wigmore Hall, London (Voiceworks, March 2007). Since Autumn 2007, he has taught two modules, ‘The Aphoristic’ and ‘The Production of the Human’, for the English department at Birkbeck.
Eliana Sousa Santos is an architect with practice within architecture “expanded fields†of landscape, sculpture and design. She did her undergraduate studies at FAUTL Lisbon, graduate studies at DARQ FCTUC Coimbra, has worked within the team of West 8 and presently works as an independent architect. Her current research interests are about the “desire for landscape†that can be found in contemporary artistic and architectural practice.
Constantine Stefanis studied art history at Camberwell College of Arts (BA Hons) and at Goldsmiths College (MA). He has worked at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the audiovisual collection of ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), London et.al. His research interests are in modernism, architecture, urbanism, exhibition culture and collections. His PhD looks at the emergence of artists’ retrospective exhibitions in Europe and considers their development into a potent contrivance of artists’ self-mythologization. Konstantinos is a member of the editorial board of Static, the web resource of the London Consortium. He is currently involved in the organization of a London Consortium event on the theme of Breathing.
Vasilis Stroumpakos studied at Architectural Association AADRL (MArch with Distinction), and at AUTH, Thessaloniki. He is co-author of the ramtv.org Negotiate My Boundary! book. With ramtv.org he has lectured and exhibited in Austria, Italy, Germany, Greece, Slovenia, UK and the USA. He has been awarded by FEIDAD, Miami Bienale Possible Futures and the Plecnick Institution. He has been an AA Research Fellow (2000-2004), and appointed teaching stuff at AA Diploma and the Design Research Laboratory. He has undertaken commissions on graphic and web design for a variety of clients including the Royal College of Art, Framestore CFC, the Architectural Association, the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, Zaha Hadid Architects. In 2002 he launched 00110.org, a web site featuring works on code, architecture, installation and web design.
Ahmad Sukkar has received a bachelor and a diploma in architecture from Damascus University, Faculty of Architecture, where he became a research assistant. He practised architecture in Damascus before moving to London to do a master’s in architecture and urbanism at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab. His design research with G_nome, his masters’ team, received AA DRL project distinction and was presented in various architectural magazines and books including different issues of Architectural Design magazine and the exhibition book of the Architecture Biennial of Beijing, 2006. It was exhibited in different occasions and it won a FEIDAD’s Design Merit Award, 2006. Ahmad worked at Zaha Hadid Architects on Pierres Vives Building in Montpellier, France, 2006. He was a finalist in AA DRL TEN Pavilion competition, 2007. His entry to Sham Spiritual Oasis competition received a citation, 2008. He is a PhD candidate at the London Consortium. The title of his ongoing doctoral research is Vitruvian Man and the Structures of Light: Body and Architecture from Classical Antiquity to Premodern Islam. Ahmad enjoys designing by algorithms, studying ethics and contemplating walls.
Peter Thornton grew up in Japan, and attended a school in Yokohama until 18. Then he attended from Columbia College and graduated in ‘98. He did a double major in English and in East Asian Studies, particularly focusing on Japanese literature for the latter. During his four years in school, he spent one semester abroad, in the English department at UCL in London. So these next few years will be the second time for him to spend a significant period of time in London. After graduation, he worked at a Wall Street law firm, and got some experience in the “tremendously exciting” field of Securitization Law. Needless to say he abandoned that career path, and eventually returned to Columbia for a Masters in Japanese Literature. At the London Consortium he hopes to build on my background in Japanese literature, and expand my knowledge of more theoretical issues.
Cesar Villareal was born in Mexico City in 1968. He studied Architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana from 1987 to 1992 where he graduated with an Honours Distinction for his dissertation “Overlapped Cities”. In 1990 he joined TEN Arquitectos and in 1994 he set a practice of his own, TallerUNO, in Mexico City. He won a scholarship from the Mexican Government to pursue graduate studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Here, he completed the Design Research Laboratory Masters in Architecture programme with the presentation of the “Urban Resort” project in January 2002. He recently founded Sociedad Anonima, an open group of people from diverse backgrounds that researches urban and architectural issues. In September 2002 he was granted a scholarship to join the PhD programme at the London Consortium.
Raymond van de Wiel holds an MA in English Literature from Utrecht University, The Netherlands and completed his MRes at the London Consortium in 2007. His PhD research focuses on possibilities for resistance within contemporary social, political, economic, and representational regimes. More specifically it will focus on the changing articulations of types of resistance by the recent criticism of the political consequences of poststructuralism by such philosophers as Badiou, Rancière, Negri, Balibar and others. It will try to relate ontological restructurings to more practical questions of emancipatory political subjectivity. For more information, visit Raymond’s website: www.raymondvandewiel.nl .
Eline van der Vlist is an independent curator and researcher. She obtained her Masters in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute in London (with distinction). Her Ph.D. research at the London Consortium focuses on the theoretical and critical discourse associated with exhibiting African contemporary art, under supervision of Augustus Casely-Hayford. She has been awarded AHRC funding. Current curatorial projects include MultiPistes (www.multipistes.org), a multistage collaborative arts project across various locations in Europe and Africa. Eline is part of the curatorial team of imagine art after (www.imagineartafter.net), a project whereby artists who have made their home in London enter into a dialogue with artists who have remained in the country of origin. The dialogues were published in 2005 on the Guardian web site, and after the dialogues, newly commissioned works were exhibited at Tate Britain in 2007. A new edition of the project launches in 2008. Eline also writes for Modern Painters.p>
Annabelle von Girsewald is researching ‘HomeBodies’, which she defines as complex situations of not feeling-at-home, inverting the American term. Her research is based in the practice of a curatorial process-orientated project (see http://www.annabelleshome.eu ). Her aim is to reconfigure the notion of ‘home’ together with international artists, curators, and architects and by revisiting thinkers such as Frederick J. Kiesler and Gaston Bachelard. The first part of the project is a conference, which will in turn determine the development of 3 basement exhibitions to take place in San Francisco, Frankfurt am Main, and London. Annabelle has recently worked at the Serpentine Gallery and Louise T Blouin Institute and formerly for museums and galleries in Frankfurt am Main. She holds degrees in Women’s Studies, Art History, Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, and American Studies.
Andreas Vrahimis received a BA in Philosophy from Nottingham University and an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths College. His PhD research examines the ways in which the increasing participation of philosophy in interdisciplinary studies affects meta-philosophical discourse and methodology. His research interests include the split between Analytical and Continental philosophy, the Pragmatists’ project of laboratory philosophy, interdisciplinary fields such as Cognitive Science, Media Theory and Cybernetics, and Ancient philosophy (with a passion for the pre-Socratics). Andreas has worked on the project of archiving cultural production in Cyprus, conducting interviews with cultural producers and organizing related events. He also plays with sound, audiovisual and interactive works in various projects (see also vybbtuan, Tramba Audiovisual Conspiracy).
Jessica White grew up on a property outside Boggabri (pop. 1000) in rural Australia. She graduated with a double Honours degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong, then a Masters in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. Influenced by her own experiences as an Australian 10 000 miles from home, her PhD investigates the themes of writing, death and distance. Using fictocriticism to draw her readers closer, it delves into the correspondence of 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy, whose passion for flowers enabled a peculiarly intimate relationship with Captain James Mangles, and into the archives and novels of 19th Century spiritualist Rosa Praed, whose experience as an expatriate Australian facilitated her communications with the dead. A Curious Intimacy, Jessica’s novel about love, lesbianism and botany in 19th Century Western Australia, was published by Penguin in Australia in January 2007 and will be reprinted in February 2008.
Matthew Wraith studied English Literature at Glasgow University graduating in 2002. He went on to do a Masters in Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Birkbeck, writing his dissertation on Waste in Modernism under the supervision of Steven Connor. He also worked for Roger Graef’s documentary production company Films of Record. He has taught English in the Basque Country, Istanbul and, most recently, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. At the consortium, he is writing about the phenomenology of 20th Century urban experience, looking at the how the city engages the different bodily senses and how they relate to theories of consciousness, the mind and the brain – the mind in the city and the mind as a city. He views the sensations of city life not through the customary notions of sensory overload but through less common notions of sensory restriction and prohibition: untouchability, deafness, blindness and visual limitation generally. He would like to examine these ideas through a range of twentieth century philosophy, literature and film. He has recently been offered the chance to pursue the last of these further through working as a researcher for a Film London documentary biopic of Derek Jarman.
Lauren A. Wright studied art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Her doctoral research at the London Consortium investigates the spectatorial encounter with contemporary art as a process of negotiation with time. Additionally, Lauren’s writing has recently appeared in such publications as Mute and caareviews.org, and she is a lecturer on the MA in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck, University of London, where she will also be Academic Advisor for the 08’-09’ year. She is a core member of Furtherfield.org, an Arts Council England-funded media arts platform based in North London, and is co-curator of its gallery, HTTP. She was also part of a team of organizers for NODE.London, an organisation working to expand participation in the media arts in London while developing new models for organisational practice. Lauren is also a practicing independent curator, with projects including Sleep: Warhol/Cage/Satie, a major performance to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol, which took place at Tate Modern in May 2007. Lauren is a founding director of Consortium Projects.
Noel Yeates completed his MRes at the London Consortium (2002) with a final dissertation on ‘The Idea of Modernity in the First World War Art and Literature of Wyndham Lewis, C.R.W. Nevinson and Paul Nash’. The subject of his doctoral thesis is on the notion of consciousness and unconscious in the work of Wyndham Lewis. He has a BA in Humanities (1997) from the Open University and an MA in Intellectual and Cultural History, ‘Civilization and Barbarism’ (2000) from Queen Mary College, University of London with a dissertation on ‘The idea of the Unconscious in the Writings of Le Bon, Conrad and Freud 1890 - 1900′.
